


drowning

by 21hax



Series: how to swim [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-04-02 10:26:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4056577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/21hax/pseuds/21hax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will's headspace, pre-incarceration, before he suspects Hannibal, when he's just wrestling with his own mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	drowning

Lying down, fighting desperately to fall asleep, Will takes in a few slow breaths as he tries to just listen to the sounds of traffic and let it wash over him. Cars, whooshing by, sporadic, sounding very close by, then a few cars, far away — the tires rolling ceaselessly against asphalt, sounding something like a combination between wind, rain, and a head rush.

Suddenly, a dog barks loudly and it takes Will out of his head with a start. His eyes snap open and he turns his head back and forth, looking frantically and unseeingly around at his room as he roughly pushes himself up into a sitting position on his bed. He rubs both his hands hard over his face, confused, feeling like he's a few veil-like layers away from reality, and he tries to push his way through them.

_My name is Will Graham. It is..._

He glances at the digital alarm clock on his nightstand.

_It is 3:41 AM. I am in...Wolf Trap, Virginia. In my home. Nowhere near a road with enough traffic to hear it like I just did._

Indeed, as Will's consciousness fuzzily refocuses into the present, he realizes it's silent around him, but for a little bit of whimpering coming from Winston. He looks back over to his dogs, and they're all lying on the floor next to his bed, asleep, all except for Winston, who's staring at Will, alert.

Will pats the side of the bed gently, and Winston immediately gets up and hops onto the bed, walking clumsily in a few circles over Will's bony legs before flopping down on his lap. Will can't help but smile and feel a little bit of tension melt off as he slowly runs his hand along Winston's back. Winston lets out a big huff of air like a sigh and readjusts his head on his front paws, and Will gives him a final scratch behind his ears before letting his hands fall to his sides as he leans back against the headboard and stares into space.

: :

The next morning he wakes up feeling surprisingly light. The warm glow of morning sun seeping in through the shabby curtains feels like a steady tide gently washing over his shaking body, cleansing his senses and indirectly encouraging action.

Winston must've relocated sometime in the night to the foot of the bed, where he now lies, peacefully asleep. Will smiles at him and tries to gingerly slide his legs out of the covers and get up, but rather unsurprisingly, Winston quickly jerks awake and looks at Will accusingly.

"Sorry, boy," Will says quietly, leaning forward to ruffle his hand through Winston's fur for a few seconds. Winston extends his front legs towards Will in a hearty stretch, his jaw opening wide in a yawn, his tongue curling adorably. Will's smile grows wider and he leans closer to grab the fur by Winston's neck and gives him a few kisses on top if his head, earning him a few licks to his cheek and nose in return. Will gives him a few final scratches behind his ears before getting up and out of bed. Winston jumps off after him, the tags on his collar jingling lightly. The movement and rustling starts to wake up the rest of the dogs; they're all pretty light sleepers to begin with, because of their backgrounds as strays, but they also know that their human waking up in the morning means bathroom and feeding time for them.

Quickly surrounded by a pack of eager and excited dogs, Will laughs and says, "All right, everyone, settle down, I'm getting there."

He slips on some hard-bottomed slippers and a thick, heavy jacket. A few of the dogs are already bounding towards the front door in anticipation, and Will has to wade through them to reach the door handle to actually let them out.

The dogs all rush past him and out the front door, and Will slowly walks out to sit down on the stairs up to his porch, and picks up a stick nearby. He whistles to grab the attention of a few dogs who aren't busy relieving themselves, and tosses the stick, sending them bolting after it. He doesn't have a lot of dog toys, not when there's plenty of fun to be had by his dogs in the expansive wilderness surrounding his house. He doesn't even have as many leashes as he has dogs anymore. They're well-trained and quick to catch on to where they're allowed.

As he idly watches them scamper about, he suddenly hears a piercingly loud electronic chirp behind him. Swiveling around to look inside his house, he sees nothing abnormal. Just as he starts to think it sounded rather like a smoke alarm, he hears it again. Just the single chirp, generously spaced from the first. It must need a battery replacement.

Sighing, he wanders back into his house and looks around at the ceiling. He hasn't really thought about his smoke alarms for years, probably. Back in Louisiana, he dealt with them frequently due to his father's abysmal attempts at cooking, but on his own Will has had the good sense and fortune to never generate enough smoke to trigger it.

He grabs a step ladder from the backyard and heaves it inside. He can't tell which alarm it is; the chirps are far apart, and they're so loud and pulsating that it's hard to tell from which direction he hears them coming.

He starts with the one in the kitchen. It's easy enough to dismantle, unplugging it from a wire in the ceiling. He doesn't have any nine-volt batteries so he just takes out the old one to stop the beeping. Just as he's climbing down the ladder, however, he hears the noise again.

"God damn it," he mutters to himself as he tosses the alarm on the kitchen counter and drags the stepladder over to the next one.

Five minutes and the two remaining alarms later, Will still hears it, with increasing frequency. He stares at the collection of alarms on the counter and flinches when he hears it again. There's no way they could be making the noise anymore, they're completely cut off from power. There has to be another alarm he's not thinking of.

A cocktail of fear and anger mounting inside him, he starts to frantically search the house, staring at the ceiling, his eyes darting to every corner. Dogs are barking somewhere in the background but he doesn't pay attention — he runs through every room, again and again, insisting to himself he's just missing it, accidentally glossing over it each time.

He must've stopped and given up at some point because now he's sitting on the edge of the bed with all his dogs around him, Winston nudging his leg with his snout, the dogs whining at him to be fed.

: :

Later, he feels utterly sick to his stomach, like the way you feel when you wait way too long to urinate, and it messes you up, feels like it's seeping through you, but Will knows his bladder is fine. He goes to the bathroom anyway.

The seat of the toilet is left up from the last time he used it. As he relieves himself, he notices a sizable spider making its way up the wall behind the toilet. He can't muster up the desire to try and catch it.

: :

Will wakes up to noises in the distance, dull and metallic, but familiar and comforting. Slowly, consciousness begins to roll over him in waves, as he moves his legs restlessly under soft, heavy blankets, and he turns away from the source of light and buries his face in the pillow. The clanking noises continue, and Will can't tell whether they're real or not, but he can't bring himself to be bothered by it right now. It sounds nice. Lively. He focuses on it like when he focused on the sounds of traffic he heard from his bedroom, lets it escalate in volume and clarity as he tries to let go of his sense of self.

His focus easily slips back into dreams, and he soon finds himself in a forest, thickly dense with trees. He weaves in and out of the trees, on edge and searching for something. He peeks cautiously through the gaps in the trees as he walks, wary of threats.

"Will."

He feels something grab his calf, and he instantly kicks his leg in reflex, stumbling over and into the floor.

"Will, it's okay, it's me. Open your eyes, wake up."

He opens his eyes desperately, his chest heaving, and realizes he's just tangled up in his own blankets, Hannibal sitting on the edge of his bed with a bracing hand on his leg. Will gives Hannibal a rare dose of eye contact as he tries to catch his breath and regain his grip on reality.

"Will? Are you in there?" Hannibal asks with the barest hint of a smirk.

"Y-yeah," Will lets out in a whoosh of air, finally looking away. "What—what are you doing here?"

Hannibal's eyebrows give a twitch of a furrow. "Will...what is the last thing you remember?"

Will sits up and back against the headboard, then buries his face in his hands with a groan. That question always means lost time. He tries to cast his mind back to a time before he was wandering, lost inside his dreamscape. It was like forgetting why you walked into a room, and looking around to try and spark your memory into remembering. Working backwards through your train of thought to try and find where you were mentally when you thought of the reason.

"I, um...I remember Jack talking to us about the new case...we were gonna go to the crime scene, but I...I don't..." he trailed off, unable to recall much more.

"I took you," Hannibal explains, taking his hand off Will and folding his hands over his lap. "I offered to drive you there under the guise of a simple carpool, but to be perfectly honest, you looked so distant and thinly worn that I wasn't entirely sure you should be trusted behind the wheel yourself. At the crime scene, you performed admirably as always, and none of your behavior seemed far out of the ordinary. I drove you from the scene, intending to take you back to the BAU for your car, but you fell deeply asleep on the way there. You looked so peaceful, and I...didn't have the heart to wake you, so I took you home, where you could continue to rest."

Hannibal looks down at his folded hands, looking like he feels his actions had been some sort of lapse in judgement on his part.

"Oh, um, thanks," Will says awkwardly, wanting to reassure him it's fine. "I really do need the sleep. And if I'd...if I'd driven myself, who knows where I'd be by now."

Hannibal catches his eye again and smiles. "That had been my thought exactly. Thank God you're right here instead, safe and sound."

He pats Will firmly on his leg again before getting up. "Well!" he says as he smooths his hands over his pants and re-buttons his suit jacket. "Now that you're more rested, what better to follow than a nice meal? I hope you don't mind, but while you slept I've been working with what little scraps your kitchen has to offer to make a modest dinner for us."

"Oh, uh...yeah, okay, thanks. I'll just..." Will gestures vaguely to himself in bed and his room, and Hannibal understands.

"Take your time," he says before exiting the room, but leaving the door open. Will should probably be embarrassed to change his clothes without a closed door between him and Hannibal but he isn't.

: :

"Don't you ever get tired of having to cook something fancy for every meal?"

Hannibal considers this, forkful of food pausing in its way to his mouth. "Don't you ever get tired of having to tend to all your dogs?"

"No," he says, giving the immediate answer. Then he pauses. "Maybe. Sometimes."

Hannibal remains silent, waiting for more.

"It's less out of getting tired of it, and more like...it just feels like a compulsion."

"You are drawn to stray dogs because you see so much of yourself in them. Sad, abandoned creatures, who are by no means defenseless when left to their own devices, but still crave some level of companionship that has continued to elude them."

Will grimaces and focuses on his food. He feels like any comment he could make in response to that will just reveal how accurate he feels it is.

: :

The smoke alarm chirping becomes a regular background noise for him. Sometimes it sounds like what a normal alarm would sound like, and sometimes the chirps come so fast it's nearly a single, endless drone. He teaches himself how to ignore it.

Until he sees the smoke.

It starts as a wisp down the hall. Then he blinks and it's a mist spread hazily throughout his entire home, like a noxious gas. He can smell it — oh god, he can smell it, it smells like a brush fire, thick and pungent, familiar and majestic, toasty, overwhelming — utterly overwhelming as it fills his nose and mouth and lungs, and he coughs desperately to expel it.

Looking around, he has no idea how to dispel this much smoke fast enough, so he hurries outside. He holds his breath until he can stumble past the threshold of his front door, but upon looking up at his surroundings, he can hardly see the usual trees and brush through the thick foggy smoke that continues outside, stained with a red glow coming from somewhere beyond the haze.

He sucks in a breath now — what choice does he have? — and it shoots a knife of pain through his chest, a molten black stab, lingering, until sizzling out with disinterest.


End file.
